Rog and I are both at a loss and I couldn't find anything on google which seemed to address this:

we gave our daughter back east my laptop this last December. It's a Dell Inspiron 1200 about a year old with very low mileage. After she and her friend used it with wifi and had no problems, the wifi went wonkey when they were downloading some music and quit working.

We decided it needed a new driver install. I downloaded the correct one from Dell and sent it to her on a CD. Tonight, when they booted up to do the install, all they could get to is the background picture. When they boot up, there is the usual box on a blue screen which asks if she wants to sign on using her name, which is the usual way she starts it up. After clicking on her name, it goes to the regular screen, the desktop background, which shows up fine. While it is coming up, she sees the few shortcut icons she has. They flicker on for a second and then disappear. Then there is nothing but the background, no start, taskbar, nothing. When she right clicks on the screen nothing comes up. I had her try to go to each edge and bring up the little arrows which point both ways and try to stretch it, thinking maybe it was so scrunched it looked as though it was gone, but the little arrows wouldn't show up either.

So..any ideas of what is going on? And, how do we force it to boot up in safe mode and/or do a system restore/recovery?

Oh, and she did do a ctl/alt/del. It showed a bunch of processes.Also it would play a video CD which I also sent her, using WinMediaPlayer, so I know something is working!

Help?

Thanks!

kat